Then two more people charged up from behind him, also intent on hugging Alba.
“Ben McGilveray!” she cried. “And Gloria! It has been just eons. Do you know Joe Wolf Mantooth?”
Four eyes swiveled toward Joe. He felt his lifelong shyness with strangers kick in, but he’d learned to cover it. He shook their hands and said he was pleased to make their acquaintance but they kept looking at him. He really would have preferred that they go back to looking at their old friend Alba. After a long moment that Joe spent wearing an awkward smile, Gloria said, “Mantooth? Do you know Cully Mantooth? Because we’re looking for him.”
“Do you know Cully?” Carson asked. “I’m the conference organizer. I can find him for you. I don’t know where he is right now, but I’ll see him eventually.”
When they said they’d never actually met him, Joe watched his old buddy shift into protect-the-celebrity mode. “I can’t get you face time with him. If I did, everybody would expect it. But you’re welcome to come to his talk tomorrow night.”
Ben and Gloria leaned their heads together and whispered for a moment. Then Ben said, “We’ll do that, but there will be a lot of people there and we might not get a chance to speak to him personally. Will you give him this?”
Gloria pulled a sealed envelope out of her purse and held it out. It was the kind of envelope that came with stationery or a birthday card, a squat and almost square rectangle, and it was yellow.
Carson hesitated. Given what had just happened, Joe figured he was trying to decide if the slim, flat envelope could possibly hold a bomb. He eyeballed Gloria and Ben, but he must have decided they were safe, because he took the envelope.
“Thank you,” Ben said. “This means a lot.” He turned to Joe and said, “It’s very nice to meet you. We’ll see you again tonight, because we wouldn’t miss your flintknapping demonstration. And we’ll be at Mr. Mantooth’s concert tomorrow night, too.” And then they took their leave and walked away.
Alba turned her attention to Joe. “It’s so good to see you. Maybe you can help me with this weird scavenger hunt of Carson’s.”
Joe raised his eyebrows at his old friend, but Carson said nothing to explain his mother’s comment.
Alba waved her phone at Joe and said, “First, he made me look at pictures of some people who I’m sure are very nice but I don’t know them. Now we’re wandering around the hotel looking for people with dark hair, which is a lot of people. Oh, and we’re also looking for an Agent Liu. And an Agent Goldsby.”
“This sounds like one of Faye’s wild goose chases,” Joe said.
Carson still didn’t answer him, so Joe knew that he was right.
“I wouldn’t doubt that your wife is involved, Joe,” Alba said. “All her wild goose chases are for a good reason, so I guess I’ll keep humoring my son,” Alba said. “Where is Faye, anyway? We’ve been all over the grounds and all through the public areas of both towers but we haven’t seen her.”
Joe hadn’t seen Faye in hours, not since he finished his talk that morning, but he had figured she was chumming around with the FBI. Now she had moved on to involving Carson and Alba in some kind of skullduggery and that worried him. He decided it was time to lay eyes on his wife. He said goodbye to his friends, then found a quiet spot to loiter while he texted Faye.
He got no answer, which worried him. Even without her real phone, Faye would have taken the time to text him back with the dinosaur of a loaner phone she’d gotten from the repair shop. True, Faye was capable of being so focused on a task that she didn’t hear the phone buzzing in her purse, but she was more than a little rattled by the bombing and by Stacy’s disappearance. She had been so rattled that she asked for an extra goodbye kiss that morning. For Faye, that was clingy behavior. It was weird that she wasn’t answering him.
Joe thought it seemed like a good time to wander around the Gershwin’s Tower Annex and try to find his wife.
* * *
Faye made her way down the alleyway, alternately attracted to and frightened by the lean-to where Cully had disappeared. Every time she took a step, it seemed like her foot banged on the pavement with a sound that echoed off the alley walls. Her breathing sounded almost as loud, and so did the heartbeat that sounded in her ears.
A drizzle of rain dampened her hair and it was only getting worse. The pavement under her feet, greasy with a century of engine exhaust and oil leaks, worried her. If she needed to run, she might slip and fall.
Why was she afraid that Cully might hear her? She had started out looking for him, so she could ask him questions about Angela, and the pictures that she’d wanted to show him still rustled in her back pocket. But then she’d seen him walk away in his weirdly practical clothes and somehow this meant that she didn’t want him to know she was behind him? That made no sense. Why the change?
The answer was that her goal had changed. Now she wanted to know where Cully was going and, based on his skulking movements, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell her. To get that answer, she needed to trail him until he reached his mysterious destination. This need for secrecy made sense, but her fear didn’t. Cully had never been anything but kind to her.
She supposed the fear had kicked in when she saw his stealth. She was trailing a man who was obviously protecting a secret. Cully himself might or might not be a danger to her, but Faye knew from hard experience that secrets could be dangerous indeed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Faye opened the door of the lean-to where Cully had disappeared and looked into a darkness that didn’t surprise her. The lean-to concealed a stairway leading down, just as she had known that it would.
Of course it did. Cully had said that his mother lived underground as a child. It only made sense that she would have told him how to get down there.
The narrow brick staircase looked as old as the one uncovered by the bomb. Cully was nowhere to be seen. More importantly, the beam of his flashlight was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing but darkness at the foot of the stairs. Maybe he’d moved further into the underground warren and hadn’t seen her open this door, flooding the upper half of the stairwell with light. She had no way to know.
Sunshine lit each stair tread, inviting her to explore. Unfortunately, the sunlight could only penetrate so far. By the time she reached the bottom step, she would be in utter darkness.
Stepping into the unknown would be so tempting, and so stupid. Faye took a step back from the open door and reached for the phone in her pocket so that she could text Ahua about what she’d found.
Before her fingers closed on the phone, she heard the sound of a clicking latch behind her. She turned to see Cully coming out of an abandoned building. How stupid of her not to realize that if Cully knew one secret way to get in and out of his mother’s old home, then he probably knew two.
On his back was a pack and in his hand was a gun. If he’d been wearing a cowboy hat and boots, he could have walked out of one of the old Western movies that her Mamaw had loved. Faye didn’t know if he looked comfortable holding a gun because he knew how to use it or because he’d been acting like he knew how to use it for years and years. Or maybe he had spent the past two days acting like a kindly old gentleman. Was anything in an actor’s world real?
“Give me the phone, Faye. There’s no reason to let the rest of the world know about this place. They’d only mess it up, like they mess up everything.”
“Would you really hurt me, Cully?”
“I just want a chance to explain things to you.”
“You need a gun to do that?”
He looked flustered. “Please. Let’s not have this conversation up here where someone might hear us. Come downstairs with me and I’ll tell you everything.”
Faye looked around. There was no one else in the alley. Who would hear this conversation that he wanted to have? More to the point, who would hear her if she screamed?
> Faye was not stupid. She knew how foolish it would be to let a man with a gun lead her to a place where he could shoot her with a reasonable hope that her body might never be found. She knew she must be in shock, because she started to give him a rational explanation of why she didn’t want to do this, but he interrupted her as he was taking her phone out of her hand.
“Please, Faye. Just listen to me. I think I know how to find Stacy, but I will not let you go until you understand how important it is that you keep my secret. Secrets, actually.”
“Will you put down the gun?”
“When we’re downstairs.”
* * *
Joe had gone beyond searching the places where hotel guests were supposed to be. He’d explored the lobbies, the meeting rooms, the stairwells, and the restaurants of both towers. Now he was going to look in places where the guests weren’t supposed to be. He figured he’d start with the laundry.
* * *
When Faye reached the bottom step, she paused. Cully was behind her, a gun in one hand. With the other, he used his flashlight to illuminate the steps as he followed her. There was no other light to illuminate the space. Some prehistoric corner of her brain remembered the sound and feel of a cave, and it used the echoes of his footsteps to give her a sense of the chamber’s substantial size. This room was big, much bigger than the painted room. When she reached the bottom, she stepped out into something that she knew intuitively was a place where people had lived. In the darkness, she felt like she was stepping out into nothing.
Cully joined her in the nothingness. Still standing just behind her, almost close enough to touch his rib cage to her spine, Cully swung the flashlight’s beam around to illuminate the room’s walls. The narrow beam only lit a few square feet at a time, making a spot of brightness that was painful to her dark-adapted eyes.
She guessed that the side walls were ten feet away from her on both sides with the wall in front of her being much farther away than that. As the light slipped down the long wall to her right, it revealed a scene that correlated precisely with all of the eyewitness accounts of the underground community. One open doorway after another pierced the wall. Presuming those eyewitness accounts were correct—and why shouldn’t they be when they’d been right about everything so far?—the doorways marked the entrances of the small sleeping rooms where entire families had passed their nights. Cully raked the light over the wall to her left, and it looked identical to the one on the right, door after door after door.
At the far end of the room, the light beam made a bright circle on the far wall. The wall looked like a blank white-plastered rectangle with a closed door in its very center. Cully flicked his wrist upward and the flashlight lit metallic conduit pipe running down the center of the ceiling. The pipe served three empty light receptacles. Then he flicked his wrist down and she saw a heavy layer of dust, scuffed in the middle by a long row of footprints.
“Have you been down here?” Faye asked.
“Not since 1962.”
“Then somebody else has been, recently. And more than once.”
Cully took a step forward. Since Faye was still in front of him, she reflexively did the same. She supposed she could balk and refuse to walk in the direction he wanted to go, but he did still have a gun.
“I thought you were going to put that thing away when we got down here.”
“You’re in no danger from me, Faye. This gun isn’t for you. It’s for the person who took Stacy.”
“Where do you think she is?”
He used the gun to point to the door in the middle of the big room’s far wall.
“Probably that way. But I want to check every last one of the sleeping chambers opening into this room, just in case.”
* * *
In a stroke of luck, Joe bumped into Agent Ahua on the sidewalk in front of the South Tower. He’d been afraid that the agent was holed up in his command center where civilians might not be allowed to go.
He got straight to the point. “Have you seen Faye?”
Ahua stopped to think. “I’ve seen her since lunch but not lately. You checked your hotel room?”
“Yep. And most every place in the Annex, inside and outside.”
To Joe’s relief, Ahua didn’t blow him off. Or maybe not to Joe’s relief. As he thought of it, he would prefer for an FBI agent to tell him that there was nothing to worry about and his wife was perfectly safe.
Instead, Ahua said, “Stacy just dropped out of sight this morning. If Faye has disappeared, too, I’m concerned.”
Great. Now Joe had confirmation that he needed to be worrying. This was just as well, because he already was. “Can you ask your people to look for her?”
“Yes, and I have a lot of them. I’ll start by ordering a search of the grounds of the Tower Annex. If she’s here, my people will find her quickly. If she’s not, I’ll expand the search.”
As he spoke, Joe saw Jakob hustling in their direction, traveling quickly for a man of his age and size. Before he had even reached them, he called out, “Have either of you seen Cully?”
Ahua met Joe’s eyes. Joe saw frustration there. Maybe even fear, if FBI agents can be said to show fear. Ahua turned to Jakob and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know where your friend is.”
Then, maybe to Joe and maybe to himself, he said, “Too many people are missing. Or maybe they’re just hiding from their friends and family. I don’t know. But I do know that three missing people is three too many.”
Jakob’s eyes stayed on Ahua’s for just a second too long, like a man who was counting to three.
Stacy.
Cully.
His eyes flicked back toward Joe, and it was as if he’d said his thoughts out loud. Oh, crap. Faye’s missing, too. He’d moved close enough to reach out and grab Joe’s hand. The way he squeezed it made Joe simultaneously feel comforted and wish for his dad.
Ahua said, “My people are on it. We’ll find them. All of them.”
Not being a trained FBI agent, Joe now felt a little useless. And he was also acutely aware that Ahua’s people were having trouble finding Stacy, so he couldn’t count on them to find his wife any more easily. He knew he was supposed to get out of the way and let Ahua’s people search for Faye, but no. That wasn’t happening. Joe was a natural hunter and he knew Faye’s habits. He needed to be part of this search. More than that, he needed to find his wife.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Motes of dust, kicked up by Faye and Cully on their slow passage along the side walls of the long room, danced in the flashlight beam. One by one, they searched the sleeping rooms, but they found nothing in any of them. It was time to pass through the door on the far wall and see what was on the far side. Cully held his flashlight beam on the door while Faye pushed it open.
The wooden door was coated with paint that was crumbling with age. It was held shut by a latch made of hand-wrought iron. The latch resisted her efforts to open it, offering up a metal-on-metal squeal that sliced open the silence, but Faye was able to work it open.
She put her hands flat on the door and pushed gently, feeling its substantial weight resist her muscles. After the first shove failed to open it, she took her hands away from the wooden surface and prepared to try again. For a moment, she stood fascinated by the ghostly glow of her dark palms, coated in powdery white pigment.
“Try again.” He pressed the hand that was holding the flashlight against the door, preparing to help her.
Faye heard the muted brush of her own hands on wood as she looked for the best way to push.
“It’ll open,” Cully said. “The footprints go right under it, so somebody opened it not too long ago. Push hard.”
She moved her feet apart, crouched into a more powerful position, and shoved.
He shoved, too, saying, “That’ll do it.”
Cully’s words were still hanging
in the air when Faye heard a tremendous percussive crack. Thinking it was a gunshot, she reflexively tried to drop flat on the ground but instead she just crumpled beneath something that was pinning her to the dusty floor.
“Are you okay? Faye? Tell me you’re okay.”
Cully tilted the heavy door so that Faye could crawl out from underneath it. She pushed herself to her knees, her eyes on Cully as he pulled the gun from his back waistband, where he had tucked it so that he could use both hands to lift. The door had hit her head hard, and her bones ached from their collision with the cold floor.
“You okay?”
Cully asked the question as if he cared about the answer. He said it as if he cared about her, and this made her feel safe. But was she? He had said that the gun wasn’t for her, but he had also said that he had secrets. Well, if Cully’s secret was that he had killed Angela or Stacy and if he was expecting her to keep quiet about it, he might as well shoot her now. That was never going to happen.
Still crouching by the door, she felt along the side of it nearest her. Cully had thrown the flashlight to the ground to pull the door off her and it was now pointed ineffectively at the wall. She could barely see her hands in the indirect light. “The hinges gave way. Well, they weren’t hinges in the way we think of hinges. They were more like leather straps.”
“Yeah. Leather,” he said. “Thick straps of leather work fine for hanging doors, when that’s all you’ve got, but you can’t expect leather to last forever.”
He helped her scrabble to her feet and she limped forward through the door opening. This was the second time in two days that she’d been knocked to the ground with no warning. In between, she had made the physically grueling trek through the storm sewer, and she’d endured emotionally grueling events like an encounter with white supremacists and the discovery of the bodies of three small children. Faye was sore and exhausted, and she wanted to sit down and quit.
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